Skip to content

Comment on Show HN: Bodily Oddities

Comments

Sleep Paralysis is for sure my favorite oddity. I've not experienced it in 20 years and I miss it. It happened about once a year when I was young and into my early 20s. Mine often had weird noises and hallucinations and creatures floating around. The first few times it was rather scary but then I realized it was pretty neat. The trick I learned is to tell myself I just have to move my toe.

Why do you miss it? It is usually described as being terrifying.

BTW sleep paralysis is likely the cause of many 'alien abduction' reports: wake up, can't move, presence in the room, sexual element (e.g. probing!).

Sleep paralysis is when you're having an intervention in the monitoring realm but your matrix being becomes aware while so. Sources can't agree if it's done on purpose or just the analgesic dosage that was too short. Next time you have one pay attention to hear if there's sound of steps as if moving away from where you are.

I was prescribed Xanax for a bit and it gave me the absolute worst sleep paralysis imaginable, with nested false awakenings.

I've never seen someone miss sleep paralysis before. I get it, but the hallucinations that people describe never happen to me. I just become aware that I'm about to wake up, but I can't yet control my body or even breathing. I always know not to panic, yet I always panic and try desperately to start moving. I can always see the room, but it's a dream version because my eyes aren't really open and it looks different once I'm truly awake.

I don't have much sleep weirdness, but when I'm about to fall asleep, I frequently imagine 3D object spinning and rapidly changing size. Kinda like the 3D TempleOS sprites [1], but 5x faster and increasing/decreasing size at the same rate.

1. https://youtu.be/LtlyeDAJR7A?t=451

Mine was always accompanied by the sensation of being watched. I could 'see' where the watching was happening, but not the actual thing watching me.

Also always accompanied by fear.

I believe sensation of a presence in the room is very common in sleep paralysis.

Interestingly the belief of what the presence is has changed with culture. It used to be demons, now it is more likely to be aliens.

I've experienced it once or twice, and mine was the classic "can't move, malevolent presence just barely in the corner of your vision". Once, I think I was actually still half-asleep-ish, and trying to yell and my wife woke me up.

Definitely not pleasant, even when I'm rationally aware of what's going on.

I had it happen twice that I can remember. Once I hallucinated that I had a third arm that snaked around to my desk lamp, and just last night that someone whispered "hello" into my ear. Apparently that last one's pretty common.

I've never seen the shadow man or anything.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.